Internet Explorer and PNG hacks
I ran into an interesting (well, interesting to me in an infuriatingly frustrating kind of way) problem with a site I had worked on and Internet Explorer (6, 7, and 8). The site displayed fine but after the page displayed I could see the status bar churning away. It would chug along and I’d watch it download hundreds of mystery items. I couldn’t replicate the behavior in any other browser.
As many web developers know, Internet Explorer 6 cannot natively handle transparent PNGs but you could overcome this by using a behavior (.htc) file. In this particular site, the .htc file was being loaded regardless of the version of Internet Explorer. It was this behavior file that was causing Internet Explorer to process every PNG on the page. I put in a conditional IE statement and this solved the problem for Internet Explorer 7 and 8.
WT… PDF?
I am working on a project for work that requires the merging of two PDFs. One PDF needs to be an editable PDF and needs to be populated with data from a MySQL database. This combined PDF then needs to be sent to the user's browser for download. I figured out how to combine two test PDFs and I figured out how to populate an editable PDF via PHP. However, the scripts that can combine PDFs seem to only work reliably with PDFs that are version 1.4 or lower. And, of course, the editing functionality doesn't seem to be available in PDF version 1.4. Soooo, I can do one or the other. I can combine the PDFs or I can populate the PDF with data.
I am going to next look into Adobe's Live Cycle software which they don't seem to list pricing for. Should be interesting.
Ugh… long day
It was a long, stressful day today. I made an error on a work project and had to work on it at night after going to my nephew's soccer game. I am tired of feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Hopefully things will get better.
I am finally getting around to setting up my blog. I've been meaning to do something with my website for ages. I'm not quite sure what I am going to use it for yet but I expect to post movie and game reviews. Perhaps some writing about my adventures in programming.
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